Bride of the Buddha Read online

  “Those are precisely the times we need to leap back into the present!” He smiled then, but his eyes were the same as when he’d warned the foreman against being in the presence of a sick man. “You can do it, Yasi. You just have to fill yourself with appreciation for life.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  In a flash, his smile spread over his entire face, his teeth a startling white, his innocence returning like the sun. He placed his arm around me. “Because we all can sing.”

  To my shock, my husband burst into a work song that all the men knew and I remembered from my childhood, praising the devas for muscle and lumber and the joys when the work was done. Now the whole grove rang with rich male voices. Once again, I felt swept up into the glory of the present moment, and when Agrata’s wife arrived I remembered the women’s part of the song, and the two of us joined in. Afterward, she served me spiced chai in a clay pot, and we watched our husbands work and sing. How wonderful, I told myself, that Siddhartha keeps up his spirits and those of everyone around him. The dark part of the moment, his refusal to look at the sick man, I folded away in my mind like a burial cloth I hoped I would never have to use. But I knew now never to ask my husband about his family’s charnel ground. Later, Channa told me it was on the other side of an almost impenetrable jungle, and the road through the jungle, although kept clear, wound and twisted as if trying to hide from itself. From no part of Suddhodana’s domain, not even the hilltops, could the charnel ground be seen.

  Our blessed life continued for almost three years. I helped Siddhartha set up his paradises. It turned out I had a knack for designing gardens, using shrubbery to create interlocking chambers flooded with roses, lilies, and orchids. We also planned systems of pools and waterfalls, arranging rocks and planting trees so that reflected ripples trembled over them, reinventing sunlight and shadow alike. Our gardens and fish-filled ponds attracted throngs of birds: kingfishers, black-crested herons, golden loras, rose-ringed parakeets, and so many others—their darts of song and color sparkling through the air. All this beauty anchored everyone who passed through, rich and poor, deeply in the present—everything so new and astonishing. Who needed to quest after souls when the glory of the earth could enter one’s heart and mind the way Siddhartha entered me? In these moments, everything was one.

  Suddhodana and his wife Pajapati stayed benignly in the background, gently reminding us of our duty to produce a son. I looked forward to having children, although living in the present as I did, my future as a mother was little more than a thought that flitted through my mind like a bright hummingbird in a pleasant landscape. Besides, those first two years of my marriage were mostly devoted to being shown off. My in-laws held feasts and parties attended by most of the clan, my own parents celebrating their daughter’s marital success and all the cousins wanting a glimpse of the ideal heir and his new wife. If they also wanted to gossip and compare, I remained oblivious as we rushed from one perfect moment to the next. In those days, I barely noticed the slivers of time in between, those dips in spirit when the pretty sights seemed to shrink into a vacuous landscape that hinted no perfect moment could ever be enough.

  But these in-between times, minuscule as they were, could be relieved as easily as a bodily pain that comes from staying still too long. If we ran out of ideas, we had the gods, who, believed in or not, always gave us an excuse to celebrate. Every god had a repertoire of deeds to be commemorated with dancers and acrobats, trained doves and elephants, musicians with lutes and drums—all joining together to reenact the cosmic dramas. Here, too, was a time for paying particular attention to the poor. Siddhartha—with his father’s halfhearted consent—made it a point that every festival not only had to include them in the communal feasts but also had to provide appropriate clothing and plenty of time off work to enjoy themselves.

  I basked in the revelations of my husband’s generosity; it was part of my overall joy. But joy, as I would learn in so many ways, is always impermanent.

  One morning I awoke in our wedding bed with a queasy feeling, not totally unpleasant, for it was surrounded by a strange kind of excitement. Through the open windows I could hear the chuckling of parrots and the gargling of peacocks, as if full of enticing news, and as the sun rose the morning light seemed to expand the room, illumining the mahogany ceiling to a rich, warm gold. I took a breath of sweet morning air to calm my queasiness and suddenly had a sense, as of a message from long ago, that a new spirit had actually made its home inside me, a soul to share my body. I was going to give birth, and I had the thought, what if Deepa was being reborn in me? I found myself hoping for a daughter in spite of everyone else’s expected desire for a son. Yet who was to say Deepa couldn’t be reborn a boy?

  I lay still, not wanting to wake my husband, wondering how to tell him.

  I must have drifted back to sleep, because all of a sudden a hoarse male shout tore through the fabric of some pastel dream. I yelped and sat straight up, terrified we were being attacked.

  “I had a nightmare,” Siddhartha said. He was panting as if he’d run the length of his property and back.

  I turned to him. His face was dark with a flush; his mouth gaped, his eyes dull with dismay.

  “What was it?” I asked, my own heart galloping as if to catch up with his.

  “Never mind.”

  I had the uneasy thought that he was still back in the dream, trying to convince himself he’d been mistaken about it. “Tell me,” I said. “Please.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “You’re troubling me now.” I felt a shadow of foreboding. On this morning of all mornings, I hated to think my husband the victim of an inauspicious dream. “I feel that you’re somewhere else.”

  He sat up, placing his forehead against his knees under the crimson coverlet. “I was trapped under a giant’s corpse and couldn’t get free.”

  “Well, the dream is over,” I said, shaking off my superstitious thoughts. “And nothing more than an illusion to begin with.”

  He finally looked over at me, and this was the beginning of all the trouble, although I didn’t recognize it at the time. “It was a woman’s corpse,” he said.

  Then he sprang out of bed. “But you’re right. There’s no sense dwelling on illusions.”

  My belly remained clenched with unease. I decided to postpone telling him my news.

  I let the next two weeks go by without revealing my pregnancy to anyone. Concealing my increasing nausea, I continued to go forth with my husband on his daily inspections, occasionally wandering off to vomit in the bushes while he conferred with this or that farmer or architect. I hoped to wait until I felt better to tell him about my condition. The last thing I wanted was for him to connect it with illness and banish me to the world of the sick.

  We were planning yet another big festival, although not for several months, celebrating Durga’s return of the buffalo demon’s blood to the earth, a commemoration most people believed would incite her to keep the seasons going and bring the life-giving monsoon. It was an annual affair, but this year Siddhartha had decided on upping the number of military games and contests, he said, to thrill the maidens and distract young men like my brother and our cousin Devadatta, who might otherwise form raiding parties in the name of spreading our Sakyan happiness to territories beyond our traditional lands. These added games required clearing a large field near the edge of the property where stables and temporary housing needed to be built, and we visited the site daily.

  One morning, I’d just left the dining room, where the servants were clearing away the collapsed rice dosas congealing on my plate, and I was waiting at the winter palace’s tall oaken door on the lookout for Siddhartha’s chariot, trying not to be nauseated by a choking smell of woodsmoke from the outside fires. The day was bright—too bright, I thought. The swallows dipping through the air around the almond trees made me dizzy. My stepmother-in-law took me gently by
the arm.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, her tired brown eyes holding me in a dark study. She wore a plain beige paridhana, and the loose braid of her long coarse hair was gray as old rope.

  I had spent the past two years being as cordial as I could to Pajapati. She was kind enough, with a keen intelligence in her eyes, but back then I cringed at her dogged devotion to her husband and adopted son. I thought she’d let her love for them drain off the sparkle of her own life, leaving her only a servant for her men’s every need.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You haven’t eaten these past mornings,” she observed.

  I knew she knew. “I just lack an appetite,” I said. “I guess that’s what happens.”

  “You haven’t told Siddhartha.” Her voice descended into severity, and I heard it as an accusation. She must envy me for being the center of attention, I thought.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” I said a bit coldly, turning her accusation back on herself. “I’ll tell Siddhartha today.”

  Her grip on my arm tightened. “You can’t go out. You can’t risk yourself anymore. It’s time both you and my son entered the next phase of your life.”

  Suddenly I was ten years old and locked in the women’s quarters—and subject to this disagreeable woman who wanted to dull me down to her level.

  “I’m perfectly fine. And the air will do the baby good.”

  The two-wheeled chariot appeared on the road. I broke Pajapati’s grip and ran toward it. “Don’t worry!” I called out, as if we’d been exchanging harmless jokes.

  I smiled up at my husband as he hoisted me to the seat next to him. I gave Channa a nudge. “Let’s go!” I said in a reckless voice, and Channa, with his usual genial shrug, whipped Kanthaka into a canter.

  Trees and fields flew by. At first I thought that my burst of energy had cleared my nausea, but I was soon overtaken by dizziness. The landscape slid into a green and yellow blur, and my viscera heaved inside me, threatening to liquefy. I grabbed Siddhartha’s arm and shoulder, fighting a dull panic as we hit a bend in the road. I wanted to close my eyes against the image of being hurled out of the chariot, but that could well make the wooziness worse. I kept my eyes on the horse’s churning white rump.

  Finally, at the edge of the big gaming field we jolted to a stop. Shaking and clammy-handed, I allowed Channa to help me to the ground, hoping Siddhartha wasn’t watching. I could hear little over the ringing in my ears, and the yellow field in front of me swarmed with black insects—no, they were men. By now my mind had slowed to a crawl, telling me how bad I felt.

  That was the last thing I remembered before I flipped out of space and time altogether.

  When I opened my eyes, the world had started over. I was peering into the dark, slick face of some indeterminate being—a demon, an animal, the god of death?—with lips drawn back over teeth so white they hurt my eyes.

  In this new world, I felt no fear or anything else, not even numbness. I closed my eyes and opened them again, and I was looking into the eyes of an unknown man. Horror and revulsion had conquered his face.

  Somewhere inside me, dark emotions I couldn’t identify were gathering for an attack. I closed my eyes again.

  “Yasi!” The strange man had put on a mask, that of my husband. “I thought you were dead!”

  I stared up at him. I was lying on the stiff yellow grass, Siddhartha leaning over me, Channa standing in the background. “I just fainted,” I said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Darling! That’s wonderful! You should have told me earlier!” But it was the mask speaking, not my husband. Then I had the thoughts: the demon had put on the stranger’s mask and the stranger had put on my husband’s mask. The dark emotions crashed through me.

  I remembered Siddhartha’s nightmare about the female corpse. I also remembered how he refused to look at the sick man, that he’d never mentioned the charnel ground the whole time I’d known him, and that he hadn’t attended Kisa’s funeral. Then an image came to me, how I must have looked when I passed out—my mouth hung open, my eyes rolling back into my head like empty porcelain spheres as I dropped to the ground like an unstrung puppet. Even now, saliva was drying at the corners of my mouth and on my chin. He’d seen me as a corpse.

  I looked into Siddhartha’s eyes, barely visible through the squint of the stranger, and I knew he was still looking at a dead body. All I could think of was the charnel ground: the torn-off arms and legs, the slimed-over skulls, the bashed-in baby. My sister, no longer a sister but a Thing.

  Yet Siddhartha was gathering me up in his arms, stroking my tangled hair, and kissing me lightly on my cheekbone, where an ache surrounded by a sting told me a bruise was forming. I sucked in air and told myself I was just imagining things.

  “We need to get you home,” he said, lifting me into the chariot. “Do you need someone to ride with you? I can get one of the workers’ wives to help.”

  “You’re not—?” Desolation choked off my words.

  “I’m needed here,” he said.

  For the next few months, I hardly saw Siddhartha at all. He was always thoughtful, always courteous, bringing me bouquets of roses and honeyed ginger to ease my nausea. He usually left these gifts at the women’s quarters, where I was forced to “rest,” enduring my mother-in-law’s relentless kindness amid the company of Siddhartha’s twelve-year-old half-sister and assorted cousins. I still slept in the marriage bed, but without Siddhartha, who spent his nights in the workers’ barracks, claiming he didn’t want to wake me when he went off at dawn.

  We were never alone together. We appeared at ceremonies celebrating us, where we sprinkled ghee and dried petals into sacrificial fires to bring a healthy son into the world. These days Siddhartha seemed like the puppet, complete with varnished-on smile, jerky motions, and eyes painted to meet every gaze but mine. I had no idea what he was thinking, and my bewilderment grew. How could he just stop loving me because of one event, one I couldn’t even help? I dreaded to hear that he had taken up with some concubine.

  As often as I could—I wasn’t a prisoner, not like later—I would take long walks, even as my belly grew, revisiting the sights of happier days. How different everything seemed now, although the spring greens thickened and deepened and the fat rhododendron buds exploded into bright punches of pink and scarlet, as they had for the past two years. But now the sweet grass and spring flowers failed to fill me with their joy. At best I felt them as a heavy solace; at worst a cruel charade, where everything remained as it was but excluded me. Over and over, my mind churned out the same thoughts: Would none of this had happened if I hadn’t fainted? Why had I foolishy insisted on going out that morning when I’d felt so sick? And what would happen to the child inside me without a father’s love?

  Then one afternoon, I came upon Siddhartha under the shadow of an enormous rain tree. He was wearing a workman’s dhoti and sitting alone next to an artificial lily pond. Beyond the tree a field of cattle lowed; the air smelled of cow dung. My husband stared into the dark water paved over with slick black lily pads, nothing in bloom.

  My heart gave a little hop of anticipation, but I realized this was an old reaction. The man in front of me had not come here to meet me, much less find me a welcome sight. Still, I had to ask the question that in one way or another he’d prevented me from asking ever since the beginning of my pregnancy. “Why are you ignoring me?”

  The mask fashioned itself into a tentative smile. “How can you say that? I spend all my spare moments with you.”

  “Me and fifty others.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “This Durga festival is taking up all of my time.”

  “That’s why you’re here, staring at the water bugs.”

  “I was just taking a break.” Again, the contrived smile, with just the right amount of regret. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to find you to enj
oy it with me.”

  “I’m here now.” I stared into the artificial eyes, trying to see behind them.

  He eyed my belly, by now a good-sized mound tugging at the front of my blue sari. “Yasi, you shouldn’t be out here. You need to take better care of yourself.” He stood. “I’ll call Channa with the chariot. I need to get back to work.”

  He was going to leave me again. A feeling of utter helplessness made me sink to my knees in front of him. All this time, in all my mulling and second-guessing, I had avoided the simple, miserable truth—that I could no more make him love me than I could change the course of a river with my bare hands. “Just tell me what happened.” My lips were quivering like a child’s, and I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “Why don’t you love me anymore? Do I disgust you that much?”

  He sat down again, head against his knees as it had been after his nightmare, and for many moments he said nothing. Finally, he stirred. “It’s not you, Yasi.”

  “Then, what? Some other woman?”

  He shook his head. “For a long time I hoped that everything would change back, that I wouldn’t have to hurt you more than I already have. Yasi, all I can think of is that we’re all going to die.”

  “But you’ve always known that! You’ve always had the strength to keep your mind from sinking into these thoughts.” A spark of rage ignited inside me. “You taught me how to do this as well.” And to desert the holy life without a backward glance.

  “I don’t know what happened. The thoughts caught up with me. Now all I can think of is how everything dies, including love. How can a corpse love?”

  The spark flared up. “What about souls? Didn’t you love me beyond my body?”

  “I thought so. But now—I’ve never understood how bodies and souls can be separated. And when I look around I picture everyone dead—I can’t help myself—it’s as if I live in a charnel ground.” He still didn’t look at me. “Yasi, I so want to love you!”